It is 1998 and Julian Everett has arrived in England after a 30-year absence. He is walking on the cliffs of Dover when he sees the face of a girl he once knew on the front page of a newspaper.
He had stopped to wonder at the ships that steamed in and out of the harbour when he saw her at his feet. He could not mistake a face that had dominated his teenage years, and nor could he forget a face that had filled the front pages of the local press thirty years previously. The page of this paper, discarded somewhere on the cliffs, had arrived in a downward blast of air and blown against his leg. He shuffled backwards and looked down. He caught sight of Kathy’s face before it tumbled away. It rolled slowly at first, and then faster and faster down the hillside.
Eventually, he decided to chase after her, but the paper got caught in another current of air and it rose towards the sky and beyond his reach. As he watched her sail away, his guilt and shame were overlaid in rapid succession by feelings that stunned him with their freshness. These feelings were connected to love and hate, to betrayal and jealousy, and they belonged to Kathy, to Hampton Court and to 1968.
Julian is immediately troubled by contradictory thoughts. Should he stay and confront the past or should he run away again?
Halfway down the cliff he stopped under a tree, scanned the town and listened to the faraway sounds of life that reached out to him. Shapes emerged from the distance, and occasional lights flickered in the centre of town. The lights brought with them the promise of new times, new places, new situations, and new faces. He watched all the miniature people going about their business. He imagined them leaving their pasts behind them like invisible vapour trails. Julian smiled at this image. It told him that 1968 was indeed a dead place, and that people’s lives had not been standing still, frozen in time and waiting for him to come home.
He congratulated himself on having recognised this illusion before it had a chance to grow beyond his control. Earlier that day he had been hoping to see people he had once known, but untouched by the years. He received a powerful but absurd image of his old friends moving like ageless but animated photographs along these pedestrian precincts. He even managed another crooked smile when he imagined himself recognising faces, Paul’s perhaps, amongst those of the faintly threatening youths grouped on street corners.
A short while later, Julian is back in Dover town centre and having doubts again.
Making his way along Dover’s pedestrian precinct, Julian reckoned that, for some minutes, he had fallen victim to the illusions that had done for many expatriates he had known. Shadowy expectations had crept into his consciousness, had warped his memory. He was anticipating dark suits, bowler hats, and men marching to work with rolled umbrellas or newspapers tucked under the arm. These men would politely greet one another while red buses emerged from a swirling mist and passed the telephone boxes, which stood on every corner.
The cool air shifted and touched his hair, his face and his smile. He bathed in the conviction that there was no need to revisit the past. It was all abstract. Life had moved on. Then a starker truth revealed itself. A second passed before the importance of this revelation reached home, and he smothered the smile in his hands. The fact of Kathy’s face in a recent paper was sending contradictory messages. She was telling him that life had not moved on, nothing had changed, that time may have passed and consumed identities, but everything else was the same.
He continued to argue with himself for a considerable time. In the end, and in spite of his best efforts, it was curiosity that got the better of him. A little excursion into the past, he thought, would do no harm. He turned to his right and said in an authoritative tone, “We’d better find that newspaper.” He nodded as if he had heard some confirmation from a voice at his side. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, “just for the sake of understanding and knowing why Kathy’s face is on the front page again after thirty years.”
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